The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.30am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last under an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was then released without charge, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

122. Wow, good catch!

30. Ironic that his name is Miranda.

So, now not just Journalists are terrorists but their wives, husbands, partners, mothers, fathers, children, aunts and uncles, grandparents.

That's just about everyone.

This has got to stop. That was pure harassment and intended to be. THIS is why all these 'terror' laws are so dangerous. Because they can be and are being used to terrorize people who have zero to do with terror.

78. Who'll stop them? OTHER men with guns? nt

7. Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised

From the Article:

"Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers. Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offense to refuse to cooperate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.

Last month, the UK government announced it would reduce the maximum period of detention to six hours, and promised a review of the operation on schedule 7 amid concerns that it unfairly targets minority groups and gives individuals fewer legal protections than they would have if detained at a police station."

A randomly-selected Jury of DU members completed their review of this alert at Sun Aug 18, 2013, 01:54 PM, and voted 4-2 to HIDE IT.

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24. Greenwald's article on this incident.

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used "to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consuls, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.

67. It slams what we tell the rest of the word to do right back in our face...

And, that this can be done to any citizen in the word passing through London without them even having a lawyer present is frightening. Do we know how many people might have been flagged and who didn't have good connections who might have been whisked away to one of our Detention Centers. Who would know?

103. Another poster obsessed with ProSense.. poor things have

106. That can't be true

That would mean that the poster was trying to avoid a rule violation through stealth naming presumably recognizable to the posters friends, but vague enough to be denied to authorities, and that can't be the case, because that would make the poster not only a juvenile shithead acting like a bully with a pack of likeminded junior-high level bullying assholes, but also an extreme fucking coward who can't even stand behind the force of his or her accusation, and I know that neither of those scenarios (shithead bully winking to other bully friends, and/or pathetic cowardly asshole) can possibly be true of Ichingcarpenter, who is a long-serving member in good standing and would never stoop to pathetic, cowardly, bullying call-outs of that sort.

92. Kinda like that Time magazine guy

who recently tweeted how he looked forward to defending the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange. It says a lot more about the person saying such things than it possibly could about their "target."

105. Yeah, I'm not really getting the "Illuminati" vibe here.

108. What does a Free Press get us?

It means we can debate the topics that matter freely. It means that in the 1850's, people could write about Slavery, and the public could consider the issue. It means that during the 1960's, we could consider the issues of the war in Viet-Nam.

So where in history can we find a time when things could not be discussed? Foreign history, plenty of examples. American History, some examples too. In the 1950's you couldn't print that the Government was using the Red Scare to intimidate people into compliance. You couldn't print that while there may be Communists in Government, that hunting them with such a dense instrument was asinine. You couldn't write that it was a witch-hunt of the worst sort.

It's amazing that so many people on our side, the traditional side of Civil Rights, have abandoned those principles of late.

119. "More than 97 percent of people stopped under the provision are questioned for under an hour,

... according to the British government." Miranda was held for exactly 9 hours, the absolute maximum allowed. If that doesn't suggest that this was deliberate harassment I don't know what would.

“What’s amazing is this law, called the Terrorism Act, gives them a right to detain and question you about your activities with a terrorist organization or your possible involvement in or knowledge of a terrorism plot,” Mr. Greenwald said. “The only thing they were interested in was N.S.A. documents and what I was doing with Laura Poitras." {i.e. they were NOT questioned about anything to do with terrorism, which is what the law says the purpose of the questioning is supposed to be)